Explanations

Today's entry in the "Trump-splainer" sweepstakes comes from Ross Douthat, the conservative op-ed columnist at the New York Times.

There have, of course, been many 'think pieces' that present an analysis of why Donald Trump, why now. Generally they focus on "soft" issues --that is, not what our policy should be with regards to Syria or gay marriage or even immigration. No, they tend to talk about the disillusionment of voters, generally the "white working class" voters who feel that history, as it were, is passing them by. This they attribute, essentially, to the duplicity, incompetence, and greed of the Washington "elite." Trump seized on these themes early, and has pressed them relentlessly. He doesn't really bother with policy: just leave it to him, and we'll be great, he says.

Many people are mildly (or not so mildly) disgusted by Trump; by his xenophobia, his arrogant self-promotion which goes beyond even that expected of politicians, his bullying of anyone who questions him. He's crude. All these characteristics are apparently strengths, in the eyes of Trump supporters.

The Washington elite are aghast, especially those in the Republican Party. They are, rather halfheartedly, attempting to mount a "stop Trump" movement. But there is a somewhat different dimension to the anti-Trump campaign. The big shots on the Republican side don't like his bombast; sure. But their real antipathy to him stems from the fact that he's just not conservative enough. Liberals may be outraged at the calls to deport 11 million Mexicans, or to bar entry by any Muslim into the U.S. and construct a national registry of Muslim citizens. But most of his Republican primary opponents have tried to outdo Trump in the extremity of his opinions: there is near-unanimity about Mexicans and Muslims; and they are, if anything, farther out than Trump when it comes to ISIS, Guantanamo, the incompetence of Obama and much of Congress, the question of whether the Senate should deign to even consider an Obama nominee to the Supreme Court.

Oh, sure, they wish he was more "civil;" but that word is used mainly to characterize the way he says what he says, and his penchant for rudeness and the politically incorrect phrasing of what are, in general, commonly-held opinions.

Indeed, so strict has become the Republican orthodoxy that Trump is criticized for his assertions that Planned Parenthood does a lot of good, or that we shouldn't let people die in the streets for lack of health care. These statements earn him the label "not a true conservative."

All this is in the Republican catechism. Mr. Douthat, in today's Times, takes a different approach. Trump's rise has been made possible in significant part by Barack Obama and how he has conducted his presidency --indeed, even his campaigns.

It is worth looking at a few of Douthat's claims in some detail:

• "First, the reality TV element in Trump's campaign is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in 2008... The quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric, the Great Man iconography and pillared sets, the Oprah endorsement and Will.i.am music video and the Hollywood stars pledging allegiance --it was presidential politics as one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part prestige movie's Oscar campaign."

• "[Trump is] ... proving, in his bullying, over-promising style, that voters are increasingly habituated to the idea of an ever more imperial presidency --which is also a trend that Obama's choices have accelerated... the current president has expanded executive authority along almost every dimension: launching wars without congressional approval, claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, and using every available end-around to make domestic policy without any support from Congress."

• "... white working-class voters ... have been drifting away from the Democratic Party since the 1970s, but Obama has made moves that effectively slam the door on them: His energy policies, his immigration gambits, his gun control push, his shift to offense on same-sex marriage and abortion. ...liberalism still needs to reckon with the consequences. As in Europe, when the left gives up on nationalism and lets part of its old working class base float away, the result is a hard-pressed constituency unmoored from either party, and nursing well-grounded feelings of betrayal.

I think it can safely be said, after the spectacle of "W" landing in a flight suit on an aircraft carrier --turned at anchor in San Diego Harbor so that the downtown buildings wouldn't be visible in the photo-op--, an effort to cast Obama as the purveyor of some newly sensational reality TV approach to politics is, well, strained. Let's leave out the ridiculous reference to "quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric," on which the Republican Party has a virtual patent. 

In fact, any objection to the imagery of Obama's 2008 campaign should be viewed in light of his 2008 opponent's casting (I use the word advisedly, and with prejudice) of perhaps the least qualified nominee for vice-president in the past hundred years. It is worth noting that this nominee, in her acceptance speech, contrasted Obama, a former community organizer, with herself, a sitting governor, who, as she said, "has actual responsibilities." She then, after losing the election, resigned her governorship halfway through her term, in order to take a high-paying commentator job with Fox News.

The notion of an Imperial Presidency has been around for much of my adult life. Certainly, Richard Nixon (who was the inspiration for Arthur Schlesinger's book with that title) and Ronald Reagan's actions in Central America, Chile, and with Iran Contra all fall comfortably within such a description. Moreover, when Obama did seek a Congressional resolution for military action in Syria, it was denied him; and those who refused to provide the authorization then roundly criticized Obama for failing to go to war in Syria. Indeed, Newt Gingrich, who at the time was a Republican spokesman of some importance, criticized Obama for threatening to act, and then for failing to act, in the same month.

It is of course true that the white working class began leaving the Democratic Party in the 1970s, or, more properly, immediately upon the signing of the Civil Rights Act by Lyndon Johnson. This "drifting away" was facilitated by Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and by the code-word racism of Ronald Reagan, such as in his "welfare queen" speech, his "strapping young buck" characterization of a black man receiving food stamps, and his announcement of his campaign, with a "states' rights" speech, at the site of one of the most notorious murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s South. Now Douthat finds Obama culpable for losing the fascist, xenophobic, and racist elements of the electorate to the Republicans. And in doing so, he manages to blame Obama for, in effect (he only implies this) the unwillingness of the Republicans to match their deeds to their rhetoric, resulting in the disillusion of this constituency and its consequent flocking to Trump.

It is hard to know what to make of this. Douthat is an intelligent person. But I would remind him that:

• Obama won two elections by comfortable margins. 
• Even as he took office, he received a barrage of political and personal insults from the Republican Party, which continue to the present time in that Party's announcement that it will not consider any nominee he may offer to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court --this from a Party that glories in its fidelity to the Constitution. 
• The years of assertions by Republicans at the margins (notably, by Donald Trump) that Obama was ineligible to be president because he was born in Kenya, and the demand that he prove otherwise even after, in exasperation, he did so, were never contradicted by a single Republican in Congress. 
• Obama has the distinction of being the only president whose State of the Union address was interrupted by a member of Congress, a Republican, yelling "You lie!" 
• It is surely remarkable that a bill sponsored by eight Republican Senators, after Obama was quoted as saying that the substance of the bill was a good idea, was defeated, with all the Republican sponsors voting against it. 
• The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives announced that his primary legislative goal would be to insure that Obama would be a one-term president. 

This list could be extended indefinitely. But what is new, and ludicrous, in Douthat's argument, is the assertion that the shortcomings in our polity are attributable to Obama. It does not require an endorsement of Obama's policies --I certainly take issue with some of them-- to object that Douthat is, ultimately, blaming Obama for the successes of the Republican Party in pursuing calculated objectives which created the conditions that now threaten that Party, and the country. And Douthat uses "weasel words" to excuse himself on this count: Obama's actions and policies "accelerated" this process that produced Trump.

This attitude on Douthat's part is reminiscent of the Republican response to the gradually increasing complaints about income inequality, over the past year or so. After trying to deny that it existed, then that it posed a problem for the USA, the Republicans acknowledged income inequality in a sloganeering fashion by stating that "under Obama, the middle class has lost ground," ignoring the fact that this problem has been 30 years in the making, and, to the extent it is attributable at all to presidential action, most of the blame should be placed on Reagan and G. W. Bush. 

Douthat's piece does not help the cause of the Republican Party, or that of conservatism in general. To suggest that their current problems arose with the current Democratic president is to ignore the history of the Republican Party since 1980. The conservative project has been set aside for the entire time of the Obama presidency in favor of a sort of tantrum, in which the Republicans, outraged at losing two elections to a black guy from Chicago, have busied themselves with minutiae when they have not been attempting to damage the country as a means of damaging Obama.

The U. S. Government has a desperate need for a competent, responsible, opposition party if its democratic traditions are to endure. It has, over the past decade, lost such a party. There is a reasonable possibility that the Republicans are fatally damaged; but that should be no comfort to Democrats, or to any Americans. 

This was concisely described by William Falk, Editor of The Week. 

the “social norms” that once kept a divided government functioning are disintegrating; for the first time in history, the Senate is refusing to consider anyone the president might nominate to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat. Elections sometimes end stalemates like this one—but after November, the crisis could get much worse.